Paris Haute Couture: Atelier Versace autumn/winter 2012

Fifteen years after her brother was murdered, Donatella Versace returned to the Ritz Hotel in Paris to show Versace Atelier, the company's relaunched couture line, inspired, she says, by Tarot cards via Picasso.

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That's quite a combination, but the Versaces are fond of risks. During Gianni's lifetime, constructing a catwalk over the Ritz's swimming pool for its twice yearly couture presentations was part of the extravagant Versace image, along with block booking the original supermodels. It certainly whipped up the anticipation. After he died, that all ended. Under his younger sister Donatella's watch, couture - the handmade, bespoke designs that can cost hundreds of thousands of pounds - became increasingly less relevant until the company stopped showing couture altogether in 2005.

At the time, it seemed an obvious solution, or part of one, to the company's mounting debts. The new super-rich were too impatient to wait months for their made-to-measure dresses (why bother when you could get a made-to-measure body in a few hours under the surgeon's knife?). Focus switched to the red carpet. But celebrity worship has gradually become contaminated. The right celebrity still represents a marketing jackpot. Wrong ones - of whom there are plenty- can kill a brand. Besides which, the super-super-rich don't want to wear something already seen on a starlet.

The trigger for returning to the catwalks was the huge success of Versace's collaboration, last winter, with the global high street giant H&M. Following the example of Karl Lagerfeld, Stella McCartney and Lanvin, fans queued round overnight and the collection sold out within hours.

"That's when I realised how powerful the Versace name still is," explains Donatella, "and I thought, maybe it's time to remind everyone that we can also do the most precious, one-off kind of clothes too, because while fashion has become more and more democratic, there's also a greater demand for luxury ".

And so evolved the perfect storm for Versace Atelier, "not that we ever stopped it completely," says Donatella "We did it quietly. Customers flew to us for fittings in Milan - or we go to them". Like most of the houses offering couture, Versace employs a SWAT team who fly around the world, particularly to the Middle East, where clients prefer to view the show online rather than brazening it out in the front row.

Wherever they watch it, clients will see canary yellow perforated leather trench coats and slim beaded dresses, some embroidered with Tarot symbols, and lots of bare skin, despite it being a winter collection. Donatella knows the silhouette her clientele prefers and she's sticking to every last curve. Patches of silicone, pearl and crystal mesh delivered here-I-am-boys shimmer. Wisps of translucent printed silk, layered over one another achieved an abstract effect that gave the standard Versace va va voom an arty dimension. In a few days, that Versace Swat team will pack up the patchwork mini skirts and draped beaded dresses and head off to the clients in Bahrain and Brazil who now have just the thing to match the modern art on their walls.